LONDON — Chanel last week finally jumped on the Xiaohongshu bandwagon and posted its first video to promote the brand’s Métiers d’Art 2025 collection revealed in Hangzhou last December.

The 34-second clip, featuring model Liu Wen sharing her experience opening the show, so far has garnered 2,700 likes and 331 comments, and helped the brand gain around 3,150 followers over the weekend on Xiaohongshu, arguably the most important social media ecosystem post-pandemic for brands to engage with Chinese-speaking, fashion-forward audiences around the world.

The Parisian haute couture house is one of the last major luxury players to open an official account for its fashion business on the platform. Chanel Beauty, meanwhile, has been running a highbrow official account since July 2020.

Previously a more local phenomenon known mostly to local fashion executives, Xiaohongshu, which is also known as Red Note or Booktok, rose to global fame in January when it became the most downloaded free app on the U.S. App Store as “TikTok refugees” started to look for an alternative platform in the face of a looming TikTok ban in the U.S.

Founded in 2013 by Miranda Qu and Charlwin Mao as a shopping guide for Chinese travelers internationally, the app was able to attract an initial user base that was affluent and in the know. Its cachet remains to this day, as it has evolved from a product recommendation platform into a full e-commerce operation.

With more than 100 million daily active users, it is currently the third-largest social network platform in China, trailing behind WeChat and Douyin, which is the Chinese equivalent of TikTok.

Compared with its local competition, Xiaohongshu occupies a unique position in the market, especially among Chinese luxury and fashion consumers, with its highly curated, engaging, peer-to-peer user-generated content and an algorithm that accurately pushes these posts to users.

Seizing that irreplaceable influence in a market amid a structural economic slowdown, Taobao and Tmall, Alibaba‘s core e-commerce business, last month joined forces with Xiaohongshu to launch a cross-platform shopping function in a bid to boost online sales.

Luxury brands began to embrace Xiaohongshu long before that. Louis Vuitton became the first top-tier luxury brand to partner with Xiaohongshu in May 2019 and started to experiment with livestreaming on the platform.

Last year, the brand hosted a first-of-its-kind resee livestreaming days after its pre-fall 2024 show in Shanghai, bringing the platform’s fashion-loving audience up close with the latest items from the collection, which included a landmark collaboration with Sun Yitian, a Beijing-based artist known for her paintings of blown-up animals. The high-production-value session attracted more than 470,000 unique visitors, setting a record for luxury livestreaming on Xiaohongshu.

Hermès officially joined Xiaohongshu in October 2023, while brands including Dior, Prada, Gucci, Valentino, Balenciaga, Fendi, Cartier, Tiffany, Burberry, and even Bottega Veneta have all been actively posting on Xiaohongshu for the past few years.

While a sharp slowdown in luxury spending in mainland China has led to a 30 percent drop in operating profits and a 4.3 percent decline in revenues in 2024, Chanel will continue to invest in Greater China.

“We have about 127 boutiques across China, and we opened 15 last year. We’ll continue to open 15 this year. We’ve invested in new cities like Chengdu, Nanjing, to talk to our client base that’s diversifying in China, so there’s a lot to look forward to in China,” said Chanel’s global chief executive officer Leena Nair, in a recent interview with WWD.